For the Boys

[mtvessel]

Aug-Dec 2018
The Gilded Chain / Lord of the Fire Lands / Sky of Swords / Paragon Lost - Dave Duncan – Eos, 1999 / 2000 / 2001 / 2003
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These four novels tell a set of stories based around an interesting magical idea. In a fantasy land closely modelled on Tudor England, highly trained swordsmen called Blades are bound to a ward - either the King or one of his appointees - by a ritual which involves stabbing them through the heart. Thereafter they need no sleep and have enhanced senses. Duncan's elaborations of this idea and its political and personal consequences are extremely inventive and interesting, and make for compelling and dramatic story-telling. Even better, the four stories are standalone despite being set in the same time period - they have links but can be read in any order, an impressive and original achievement. So it's such a shame that the lack of diversity in the characters, which would not have been seen as a problem when they were written, has caused them to date so badly.

The magic system is simple but extremely clever. It is based on an octogram in which four of the points represent earth, air, fire and water, and the other four love, death, time and chance. By invoking or banishing the spirits of one or more of these eight elements, an enchantment can be placed on the person or thing at the centre that is an admixture of them. Thus the Blades' binding ritual invokes love, death and chance, a fire protection spell invokes fire and revokes death, and so on. The spellcasting is ritualistic and requires long preparation, which allows Duncan to get away with using a historical model for his land of Chivial. The court politics is closely modelled on Tudor England, as is its King Ambrose, who has Henry-the-Eighth-like problems with wives and fertility.

Although I said that the novels can be read in any order, The Gilded Chain is probably the best with which to start. It follows the life and times of Sir Durendal, an outstanding Blade who is bound to Lord Nutting, a worthless courtier who has earned the honour by dint of being the brother of King Ambrose's mistress. It seems that he is bound to a life of drudgery serving a toadying fop, but fate has other plans, which involve travel to other lands, the discovery of a dark magical secret, and a developing rivalry with Kromman, the King's private secretary.

The variety in the storytelling is impressive and keeps the pages turning. I could have wished that the politics and events had not adhered quite so close to the historical template - there is even an analogue to the dissolution of the monasteries - but the magical additions kept it fresh enough.

One other deviation from the historical template is that Ambrose's chief external enemies are Viking-style raiders called the Baels, and it is in their homeland that Lord of the Firelands is largely set. Duncan sets about humanising the enemy by seeing them through the eyes of two blades called Raider and Wasp, who fall afoul of King Ambrose by refusing to be bound to him. This book does some very interesting things, including presenting a rather different view of Ambrose and a timeline that is at odds in certain key respects with that of the first book. I don't think it entirely succeeds in redeeming the Baels, however - they turn captured Chivians into thralls by putting them through a perversion of the Blades' ritual that robs them forever of self-will, and to me this is so horrific that I could not see them as the likeable people that I was meant to.

One drawback of a world based on a Tudor template is that men dominate all the public walks of life, and indeed the few female characters in the first two books are mouthy but agentless. To his credit, Duncan tries to remedy this in Sky of Swords by making his viewpoint character Malinda, Ambrose's surviving daughter, but not particularly successfully. The story is set in the alternate timeline of Lord of the Firelands and concerns her attempts to protect her younger brother Amby (yes really) against the machinations of the protector of the realm, Lord Granville. Although Duncan does a reasonable job of imagining what the life of a Tudor princess must have been like, her circumscribed circumstances mean that she gets to make few decisions for herself and instead has to rely on her coterie of Blades. Things get even worse when she falls in love with one of them which means that she spends the majority of the second half of the book in a romantic haze rather than getting on with saving the country. One interesting thing that this book does manage to do is to reconcile the disparate timelines of the first and second books, albeit in a slightly clumsy way, making these three books a satisfying trilogy.

By contrast, Paragon Lost is a standalone novel and suffers from its main character, Sir Beaumont, having rather too many similarities to Sir Durendal. It doesn't help that the plotline also involves a trip to foreign parts, this time to Skyrria, a thinly-disguised Russia complete with stereotypical bully-boy Tsar. Again, the main female character, Tasha, is there to be rescued, and the other main female character, Isabelle, is there to be Beaumont's reward for completing the mission.

These are enjoyable books by any definition, but they have aged somewhat. Nowadays it is hard to imagine an all-male institution like Ironhall without at least a hint that some characters may feel more than a manly respect for each other, but Duncan dismisses the possibility in one line as something shameful and moves on, despite the obvious interesting story implications. Nor is there much sense of cultural diversity - characters are firmly culturally coded by their countries of origin despite the large amount of trade that clearly goes on. And, as I have mentioned, half the human race is largely ignored or constrained to certain circumscribed roles. Obviously this was normal in fantasy twenty years ago - think of David Eddings' near-contemporaneous Belgariad books, to which these bear more than a passing resemblance. Still, it's a shame that these fun novels are so much products of their time and as such, more likely to be forgotten.